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{
    "id": 943766,
    "url": "https://info.mzalendo.com/api/v0.1/hansard/entries/943766/?format=api",
    "text_counter": 519,
    "type": "speech",
    "speaker_name": "Sen. (Prof.) Kamar",
    "speaker_title": "",
    "speaker": {
        "id": 33,
        "legal_name": "Margaret Jepkoech Kamar",
        "slug": "margaret-kamar"
    },
    "content": "money in the right way? If your expenditure is as per the budget, why would you not submit the documents? The other observation that was extremely worrying, to me, is something called unsurrendered imprest. When we have unsurrendered imprest running into millions of shillings, you ask yourself; is there an accounts department in our counties? Do we have accounts departments that actually watch and inspect their own books to ensure that any officer who is given an imprest comes to surrender it? More worrying is an observation by the Committee that other than the issue of unsurrendered imprest, members of the executive or officers accessed more imprest while they had not surrendered previous imprest. This again, should really worry this House because if an officer can go for a trip, come back and go for a second trip without surrendering the first imprest, it becomes a bulk that nobody knows whether the trip occurred or not. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, this is a very worrying trend in counties. We cannot run counties like entities that do not account to anybody. It is therefore, possible that because of these bulking of imprest around individual officers, it is impossible for them to surrender the documents for audit purposes because that is when the issues will be unearthed. So, that again becomes a major loophole in the financial management in our counties. In our case, we have the unreconciled land rates receipts and non-reconciliation of collections of revenue. It is worrying because it appears that our counties collect and bank money but there is a major difference between what is banked and what is collected. Another observation that came from the Committee is the fact that there seems to be something called direct expenditure. It means revenue is collected and spent directly at source. These are accounts for FY 2014/2015. If expenditure by imprest was done in FY 2014/2015, it cannot take five years to collect receipts and surrender imprest. It means there is something deeper than what we are seeing. I thank the Committee because they went further to interview CECs and governors in the hope to recover more documents even after the audit was done. It seems they did not make any headway because they did not get documents. The documents that were not surrendered to the Auditor-General do not seem to have been found even before they appeared before our Committee. Is that not impunity? How can counties take five years to make an officer account for money? Spending at source is against the law. You cannot collect money and spend it. Mr. Deputy Speaker, Sir, it is unfortunate that my county is among those that did direct spending at source. The documents cannot lie. The documents presented by the county show that there was collection of revenue to the tune of Kshs800 million but a colossal sum of Kshs133 million was not surrendered. What does that tell us? Are we still looking for the documents or waiting for them or are we still waiting for accountability? What exactly is going on? I picked the glaring issues in my own county. I tried to compare my county with other counties because I started getting worried that I seem to come from a county where people are not accountable to anybody. However, I discovered that the other counties are also doing the same. We need to find out what is going on in our counties. Does the The electronic version of the Senate Hansard Report is for information purposesonly. A certified version of this Report can be obtained from the Hansard Editor, Senate."
}